I recently discovered that this was one of David Cameron’s holiday reads. Don’t let that put you off – it’s brilliant.
Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies is a rare combination of light and dark: a novel that makes the reader smile with affection and recognition while unpicking unpalatable truths. The novel focuses on a group of fourteen-year-old boarders at a Dublin school for boys, who are teetering on the precipice of adulthood. At its centre are roommates Daniel ‘Skippy’ Juster and Ruprecht Van Doren, whose clumsy efforts to find a place for themselves and impress the opposite sex are mirrored by those of their teacher, Howard, who is a decade older and reminds us that adulthood does not necessarily bring wisdom or clarity.
It’s very funny throughout, packed with gloriously perceptive – and occasionally disturbing – insights into the minutiae of teenage life. The boys’ lives consist of one scheme after another, driven by their feverish imaginations; they are both in awe of and perplexed by girls, and small events such as a school dance take on enormous significance. In some ways, Skippy and Ruprecht follow an archetype that’s informed countless novels on teenage life: Skippy an unassuming student smitten with a girl; Ruprecht his geeky sidekick. But all the characters, while they stir affection through their eccentricities, also feel strikingly modern. There’s an unflinching honesty in their portrayal, from their obsession with pornography to their involvement in a burgeoning black market in prescription drugs.
The novel conveys the torpor of school life: the stifling heat of an old building heated by faulty radiators; the apathy that makes students slump back in silence and hope the teachers pick someone else. Away from the classroom, however, hormones and emotions rage, conveyed through a text so malleable that it often feels hijacked by its teenage characters’ minds. The novel revels in the rhythms and eccentricities of their speech, from text message-speak to the American lilt of the girls’ sentences. Stream-of-consciousness expresses the confusion (drug-induced and otherwise) that seizes the boys, and the novel’s always joyfully chaotic, a pastiche of conflicting ideas all shouting for attention.
It’s refreshing to read a book that’s so candid about the pains of adolescence: the sense of awkwardness in your own skin, the transient friendships and the bewildering blankness of adults too concerned with their own problems to give credit to yours. Underneath the humour, there’s a pitch-black tinge: traumas in some of the boys’ lives, which they are too young to understand fully, bob up occasionally from the depths of their consciousness.
If there’s a flaw to the novel, it’s that the adult characters are far less interesting than the young ones. This is clearly, to some extent, intentional: Howard’s haplessness shows we never really mature, while the cynicism among the teachers and parents brings the more colourful, visceral world of the boys into relief. Unfortunately, this means that when the focus is on the adult characters, it feels like a frustrating detour from the real action.
Skippy Dies is still a remarkable book: exuberant, extremely funny, yet ultimately cynical about the onset of adulthood, which descends on the young characters like a mist. It’s full of sadness for the unfortunate few who have to deal with life’s darkness too early. But it so dexterously weaves together its composite parts that there is no clear divide between its light and shade.
This originally appeared on the Bookgeeks website.
Samantha Cox 
